Slow Life

Top 10 things about being on holiday:

- The hammock
- Ice tea (after it’s spent about two hours in the freezer)
- Being barefoot all day
- Eating slow meals, and drinking all the beer or wine as I like
- Catching up with some of the many albums I haven’t had time to hear
- Watching the ‘free dogs’ (as Konstantine calls them)
- Doing a little bit of leisurely, obligation-free gardening work
- Washing outside in the sun with just a bucket of water
- No reminders, no appointments, no to-do lists, no deadlines.
- Actually having time to think

My least favourites things are pretty much all insects. Many of the insects here I can’t even identify- but that doesn’t stop them being vaguely threatening. Mosquitoes are annoying. There are lots of spiders. Snakes have already proven to be a problem in this part of the world (White snakes = nice, black snakes = deadly, apparently). I just saw a hornet the size of a small bird. In fact, Konstantine thought it actually was a bird, until we saw it crawl into a crack in the wooden walls of the villa. Apparently we are sharing our house with it.

We're in east Attica, Greece. We are close to the sea, an hour from Athens, and we have almost no plans at all. Next week we will head to Skiathos and maybe Skopelos, islands a few hours north of here.

I got a minor thrill today when I managed to find an open wireless signal for the first time here, by holding my laptop up in the air from the balcony. This is perfect, because it is just inconvenient enough to make sure neither of us spend longer than a couple of minutes online (simply because it hurts your arms!) and no more. But it’s good to have some kind of connection to the outside world, you know, in case we actually do meet a black snake, or the hornet decides he prefers to keep the house to himself.